


A Suitable Arrangement

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Royalty, F/M, Mutual Pining, any resemblance to an actual historical period is incidental, for both couples really
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Alexander Hilbert, fourth in line to the throne of the Kingdom of Hephaestus, finds himself about to be hitched to the Crown Princess of the Kingdom of Goddard as a means to bring an end to the war between the two countries. As one might imagine, he's more than a little bit apprehensive about marrying a woman he's never met. (AKA I found a pile of arranged marriage prompts and the next thing I knew I'd written many thousands of words.)
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert & Isabel Lovelace, Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character, Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

“I would much rather marry you,” Alexander muttered, fiddling with the embroidery on the sleeve of his doublet. “At least with you I would know what I was getting into.”

Isabel snorted. “Yes, and I’d murder you within the month and steal your place in the succession.”

Alexander shrugged. “A small price to pay for not having to marry a stranger.” And his bride-to-be was a stranger to him. They had exchanged letters, of course—their respective parents, who had masterminded this match some eight months before as a means to unite their two countries in something other than continuous war, had known better than to fling them into it without any knowledge at all of one another—but the letters had been dry little missives, couched in the language of diplomacy on both sides. He knew nothing of her personality, other than she was good at writing dry little diplomatic missives.

He did not even know what she looked like. He had been sent a sketch, but the artist themself had admitted to it being a poor likeness. “You will tell me your impressions, if you see her?”

Isabel glanced sideways at him. “You mean when I go meet with her security officer?”

Alexander nodded.

Isabel shot him a grin. “How about you come along with me? I know where to find some spare uniforms that are about your size.”

“You had better know where to find them. You are the captain of my guard.” Alexander frowned, considering the offer. “Do you think that would work?”

“Well, it’s not like she knows what you look like either. None of them will. And let’s be honest, you don’t look particularly princely.”

It was a tempting thought, if he ignored Isabel’s insult. “And if she is not there?”

“You’re up to flirting with some servants for information, aren’t you?” Isabel winked at him, her joke obvious. Alexander was notoriously awkward in social situations, for all that he had spent his entire life training for them.

“Depends on the servants.” He lifted his chin, challenging her.

“Come on, then.”

The castle was unfamiliar to them both, a massive, blocky building that was more fortress than anything else, which had, until recently, been used as a border garrison for the enemy. No, not the enemy. He needed to stop thinking about them that way. It was hard; this war was older than he was, and the habit of considering the Goddarians the enemy had been engrained in him from birth. And there was no doubt they thought the same of his people.

Would she hate him, his bride? Not for anything he himself had done, but for the actions of his country, or even just because she had been trained to hate Hephaesteans in the same unconscious manner as he had been trained to think of her and her fellow countrymen? He could not begin to guess.

Alexander tried to think of something else as they made their way to where the princess was quartered. This was a section of the castle clearly meant for occupation by the royal family; the walls were decorated with tapestries, albeit rather threadbare ones, and it seemed somehow more lived-in than the rest of the castle.

The princess’s rooms opened off a small garden, which they had to cross to get to her door, a circumstance Alexander wondered at until he glanced up and found a soldier with a crossbow at hand glaring down at him from a second floor balcony. A swift glance towards the other side spotted a second, and confirmed his impression that this open square would become a kill zone if someone who was not cleared for passage attempted to come to the princess’s quarters.

Isabel knocked on a solid wooden door and they were let into the sitting room by a giant of a woman in a Goddarian uniform, stern-faced and broken-nosed, with thin pale scars tracing lines in the pale brown of her skin. She nodded at Isabel and shot Alexander a suspicious look.

“It’s all right, Lieutenant Minkowski, he’s just a trainee.”

The woman glared at them both. “Can’t he wait outside? I’d rather not discuss security proceedings in front of a stranger, even if he is one of your men.”

Isabel smiled at this, for some reason. “Disciplined as always, Renée.”

Ah. Alexander recognized the tone of Isabel’s voice. His friend was interested in the woman.

“Maybe he can keep me company for a turn around the garden,” a new voice interjected. “Goodness knows I could use some fresh air and sunlight after that carriage ride, and I simply _can’t_ face any more unpacking at this moment.” A fat little woman, almost as dark-skinned as Isabel, emerged from an open door at the side of the sitting room. Alexander thought she must be a servant of some kind from the simple cut of her gown and the stylish cap on her head that bound her hair out of sight.

“Ma’am—“ Lieutenant Minkowski protested, before being cut off by a dangerously raised eyebrow from the short woman. A very superior servant, then, if she could gainsay the word of the woman who oversaw the princess’s security.

“She’ll be safe with him,” Isabel said in a bright voice. “He’s not the sort to try anything improper.”

Alexander shot his friend a sour look. Not that he _was_ the sort to try anything improper, but he resented the way she had put that, all the same.

“I really must get out of doors before I lose my mind,” the servant woman said with a coy look up at the Lieutenant. “And I’m sure you’ll be happier if I inflict my chattering on someone else.”

At this, Lieutenant Minkowski showed the first sign of anything other than sternness, rolling her eyes in response to the woman’s coy tone. “Fine. I suppose if he does try anything, he’ll get shot.”

“Hopefully it will not come to that,” the serving woman said, throwing her hands in the air. She bustled across the room towards the door, sweeping Alexander up in her wake as she went. He followed her into the garden, wondering if he ought to offer her his arm. She certainly did not seem to be in any need of it. She set out immediately for the opposite side of the garden, where there was a patch of sunlight streaming down over the high walls that surrounded them, and Alexander followed, bemused. Once there, she leaned back against the sun-warmed wall and tilted her head back, eyes shut, clearly basking in the warmth, her brown skin glowing in the golden light. “Lovely,” she murmured, loud enough for him to hear. “Just what I needed.”

“You work for the princess?” Alexander ventured cautiously, leaning against the wall at her side.

She opened her eyes and shot him a sharp, sideways look. “Yes. And you’re part of the prince’s royal guard?”

He hesitated for a moment before nodding. “Yes.”

They stood there in silence for a few minutes. This would be an excellent opportunity for him to learn more about his wife-to-be, if meeting her was out of the question. He just needed to figure out the best way of asking.

Fortunately, the fat little serving woman seemed to have concerns along the same lines as his own. “What’s he like?” she asked, breaking the silence. “The prince, that is.”

Alexander hummed and considered. He had no idea what to say to her. Isabel would, but Isabel was not here. “He is... withdrawn,” he offered up when the silence became too loud for him. “He spends more time with books than with people,” he added. An unfortunate truth. He had never been a military man, to the regret of his parents. But he had three older siblings still living to fill that niche.

The serving woman clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “And would you say that he is a kind man?”

An impossible question to answer of himself. Was he kind? “He is sarcastic,” Alexander said, playing for time. “He does not have much patience for human folly.”

“I see,” the serving woman said contemplatively.

“And your mistress? The princess?”

The serving woman bit her lower lip and leaned in close to whisper to him. “No patience for human folly at all. She’s a dreadfully judgmental woman.”

If true, that did not bode well for his future. There was plenty about him to judge, and very few judgements that would come out in his favor. “Is she...” He paused, and tried to decide how to ask what he wanted to know. “Is she an intelligent woman?”

The serving woman sighed. “Too intelligent for her own good, and not the slightest amount of common sense to go with it.”

Alexander almost laughed. It was something Isabel said of him often. “I see.”

“Is he an attractive man?”

Alexander raised his eyebrows. “You expect me to be able to judge that?”

“I could have sworn...” The serving woman blushed, her skin darkening to a rosy brown that was most becoming. “I thought that perhaps your captain said I would be safe with you because you’re the sort of man who is interested in other men,” she muttered.

“Ah. Well. Not _just_ other men.” That pronouncement got him another sharp look from the serving woman. “But... he is my prince. Who am I to say whether he is attractive or not?”

“Well, maybe you can tell me this. I have—I mean, the princess has—met several of the man’s siblings. Is there any family resemblance?”

It would depend on which siblings. Alexander had been a premature baby, coming out too soon and too small, and never thriving in the same way his siblings had. “A slight one, yes.”

“That’s something,” the serving woman muttered.

“And is there much family resemblance between the princess and the king and queen?” He had met King Marcus and Queen Miranda, though he doubted his own ability to imagine their offspring. Distinguishing faces from one another had never been his strong suit.

For some reason, this got him another one of those sharp looks from the serving woman, and a tense moment of silence. “You... don’t know how royal succession works in the Kingdom of Goddard, do you.”

“The most recent book I read claims a hereditary monarchy, same as ours.”

“The past two generations of monarch have been chosen by merit,” she said bluntly.

“Pardon?”

“Extensive testing, both physical and mental, of every young child in the kingdom. The ruling family chooses the children that best meet their specifications to train as heirs.”

A shocking pronouncement. Alexander did not know how to respond.

The serving woman seemed to deflate a little. “Of course, wealthy families are still at an advantage in this system. They can afford to educate their children.”

“Implying that the princess’s original family did so?”

She nodded, a sour look on her face. “Though it’s entirely possible it was a political choice. Her birth parents own the largest arms manufacturer in the country.”

A pronouncement that left him feeling uneasy. “And the princess. Does she take after her parents in that?”

“You mean does she manufacture weaponry?” The serving woman laughed. “No.”

“Is she warlike, is what I meant.”

“What you meant to ask was whether she would sabotage this alliance to benefit her birth parents.” The woman turned a steely look on him, and Alexander could only nod ruefully in response. But at least her face softened at his nod. “No. She wants an end to this war.”

“So does the prince.” Alexander cleared his throat.

“That’s something.” She had turned half away from him again, and her profile was thoughtful, her utterance of the rote phrase contemplative.

“Is the princess attractive?” Alexander found himself asking. He did not need her to be so, of course—after all, their marriage was a matter of politics, not liking—but he was curious, all the same.

This question got a very strange reaction from the serving woman. Her gaze darted up to meet his and away, and she brought her hands up to fold across her stomach and began fiddling with her fingers, interlacing them and then releasing. “She is...” The woman sighed. “Not what anyone ever expects a princess to look like,” she finished, staring down at the ground.

“I do not know what a princess is supposed to look like.” He paused and schooled his thoughts, determined not to give his identity away with a careless slip of the tongue. “Princess Olga, she is a soldier. And Princess Marya...” he considered the older of his two sisters, trying to decide what to say about her. “She is a mother,” he said with a shrug. “And a soldier as well, though she has not seen battle since she became a mother.”

“A martial lot, the prince’s siblings.”

“He is not much like them.”

“So you’ve said.” The woman stretched her arms out in front of her. “Shall we take that turn around the garden now?”

Alexander straightened up from his lean against the wall and, after a moment of hesitation, offered her his arm. She tucked her hand through the crook of his elbow and smiled up at him.

He almost forgot how to breathe for a moment, such was the force of that smile. It went all the way to her eyes, that smile of hers, creasing the corners into neat little lines.

Alexander cleared his throat and turned his attention to the stones of the little path that wound around the edge of the courtyard’s garden. For all her legs were short, she had a brisk stride that he found it difficult to keep up with. Perhaps if he got her talking again she would slacken her pace. “The princess,” he said, doing his best not to pant. “Can you tell me what she enjoys?”

He had not been as subtle as he hoped; the serving woman slowed her pace to match one he was more comfortable with. She, damn the woman, did not seem to be out of breath at all. “I could tell,” she said saucily, “but I am not sure you could give me anything worth breaking that particular confidence for.”

Alexander had been too bold, too obvious. His cheeks flushed hot and embarrassed. “I apologize,” he said stiffly. “I meant no offense.”

“None taken. It’s not as if I haven’t been pumping you for information myself.”

They paced on in silence for a while, round and round the small courtyard, her hand still tucked firmly around his elbow. Finally, he could bear the silence no longer. “What would be price enough for you to break confidence with your mistress?”

The serving woman laughed at that, a sound that drew his eye to that mouth of hers once more, which curved into an amused smile as she teased him. “What would your price be, sirrah? Far too high for any to afford, I should hope.”

“A kiss,” he said without thinking, or at least without thinking of anything but the curve of that smile of hers. And what sort of a man was he, to be offering kisses to his future wife’s servant when they were only a few days from being married?

Her eyes met his, wide and considering. “So easily bought.”

He shook his head. “A special price, for you.”

She laughed again and ducked her head to one side, that rosy blush darkening her cheeks once more. “And am I to sell my mistress’s secrets for kisses as well? What a dreadful man you are.”

“Probably.” Definitely. Even if his wife-to-be allowed him the latitude for the sort of discreet affairs that were so often and easily accepted among those of their class, this woman must be off limits, for her closeness to the princess if nothing else.

A pity, that.

Ah, no. No pity here. It was simply that smile that had charmed him, he was sure. That smile, and the fact that only Isabel and his siblings teased him, these days. It was refreshing to be teased by some person who knew nothing of who he was. And it would no doubt be mortifying for the woman, when at last she learned who he was.

He was better than this. He had to be.

After all, the end of a war depended on it.


	2. Chapter 2

Lieutenant Minkowski—Renée—watched Alexander leave with the serving woman with what Isabel privately thought was a paranoid amount of wariness and caution. After all, as short as that serving woman had been, Isabel was pretty sure that the woman carried more than enough bulk to overpower Alexander if he tried anything.

Which he wouldn’t, because this was Alexander, but Renée didn’t know that.

“They’ll be fine,” she said, trying for a teasing tone as the door closed behind them. “He’s a gentleman.”

Renée sighed and rubbed her hand over her face. “He had better be. That was Princess Rosemary.”

A snort of laughter escaped Isabel before she could even consider trying to hold it back. “I’m sorry?”

“And she’s probably interrogating him about her future husband,” Renée added with a frown.

Isabel tried to stifle her laughter, but a high, nervous giggle escaped her anyway. “Is this a joke?” she asked, breathless amidst her attempts to not dissolve into helpless laughter.

Renée glared at her. “Of course not. What’s wrong with you?”

Isabel took a deep breath and tried to project an impression of calm, but it was a struggle. “Renée, _that was the prince_.”

Renée stared blankly at her for a moment, and then blinked twice in succession. “Oh, good gods,” she said faintly. And then, she took a tottering step sideways, collapsed into an armchair, and buried her face in her hands to let out a scream of hysterical laughter.

Isabel joined her, taking two steps of her own and slumping bonelessly against the wall as she howled with hysterical laughter of her own.

A knock at an interior door interrupted them both, a lanky young man poking his head in to check that everything was all right. As Renée did her best to reassure the young man, Isabel regained her breath and dotted the helpless tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her uniform. By the time the door closed and Isabel looked at her counterpart again, Renée had mostly recovered herself, though she was still bent over, propped up on one elbow against the arm of the chair, the occasional helpless chuckle shaking her.

“So,” Isabel started, her voice low and raspy from the laughter. “Were you just going to let the princess interrogate _me_?”

Renée sighed. “No, I think she wanted some fresh meat.”

For a long, confused moment, Isabel had no idea what Renée was talking about.

And then, suddenly, she did.

The reason Isabel had been at Alexander’s side as his captain of the guard these past eight months, instead of on the front lines where a captain of her experience belonged. The reason why sometimes, he was just as protective of Isabel as she was of him. The memory of the six months before that, in a camp that held prisoners of war, her broken arm rotting from the inside out, her knee damaged beyond what she thought was any hope of repair, wounds that still pained her to this day.

The woman she had thought was a physician, talking kindly to Isabel as she drugged Isabel with opium until she could operate on the damaged limbs without Isabel being able to feel it, while Renée had stood protectively by. The woman who had taken advantage of Isabel’s incoherent state to worm information out of Isabel about her friendship with Prince Alexander.

She had hated herself for it at the time, but once her arm and knee had healed well enough for her to travel, she had been brought before the King and Queen of Goddard, had been tasked with taking their first peaceable overture back to the Kingdom of Hephaestus. She had not thought to wonder then about why the woman who had repaired her had been in the room, but she had known, somehow, that it was that friendship with Alexander and her betrayal of its existence that had saved her. And which, had, in turn, lead to this.

“Blistering hells, Renée, why didn’t you tell me?” Isabel rubbed her hand over her face, suddenly shaking.

“Ah, yes,” Renée said drily. “Tell the enemy combatant who felt like she didn’t have anything left to lose that oh, by the way, the noncombatant sitting here with a _very_ sharp and dangerous blade in her hand is the crown princess of my country. I would definitely be doing my duty to protect her then.”

Perhaps Renée had a point. The state Isabel had been in back then, she might have attacked Princess Rosemary, might have tried to kill her, for no reason other than opportunity and a desperate belief that she had been dying.

And instead, they were brokering a peace.

Renée was still watching Isabel, her gaze steady, her face carefully neutral, and Isabel forced a smile on to her face in response. “Right. Yes. I suppose… I suppose that makes sense.”

Renée gave her a wan smile in return, an acknowledgement of the strange situation they now found themselves in. “She never realized the danger she was in. She wanted to tell you.”

“You protected her well.” Isabel said with a nod of acknowledgement.

Renée nodded back. “We’re going to protect them both now,” she said, her steady gaze piercing Isabel to the core.

And maybe, if they all survived long enough for both of their countries to accept this match, they could consider something more, that gaze said. Maybe, if the peace lasted, they could be two women instead of two soldiers.

But for now, it was time to get to work.

Rosemary glanced curiously up at the man she was walking with as he went stiff and quiet, withdrawing into himself, obviously in reaction to some internal cue. A pity. He was handsome enough that she’d enjoyed his flirting.

Not that she should be flirting with a random guard when her wedding was only a few days away, but this might be her last chance to do something of the sort, so she would enjoy it while she could.

“I was just teasing you, you know,” she said, leaning slightly into him for a moment, a gentle bump of her shoulder against his upper arm meant to reassure him. “You seem to be a very nice man, not a dreadful one.”

He blushed at this, a bright red that stretched from his hairline to his beard. He blushed easily, this guard. Yet another incongruous thing about him; aside from the uniform he wore, he did not seem much like a soldier, not in the way Captain Lovelace was. His shoulders hunched forward slightly, as if he spent most of his time at a desk, and the way he had panted as he tried to keep up with her had only increased her impression that this was not a man who was overly physical in his day job.

But he _was_ a nice man. A flirt, but he had answered her questions, as rude as they had been.

The only answer he gave to her friendly overtures was a wan smile, quickly faded. Rosemary frowned at the sight and set her mind to charming him back into cheerfulness. It was always easier to get information out of people when they were in a good mood.

“Captain Lovelace seems as if she has recovered well from her injuries,” she ventured, a change of topic that would hopefully be less fraught for both of them.

The guard gave her a startled look. “You have met her?”

Rosemary nodded. “When she was a prisoner of war. I operated on her.” She let out a sigh. “Wasn’t much I could do for her knee, but it seems that what little I was able to do was enough, and it looks like she has full use of her arm.”

The guard raised an eyebrow at the subtly interrogative tone of the sentence. “She does,” he said mildly. “You are a surgeon?” The last was asked with a suspicious look on his face, and Rosemary felt her own cheeks flush. Damn, but she would give herself away like this. Not that he would ever suspect that she was the Princess herself, but he had seemed to think she was some sort of household manager, and a household manager would _not_ be doing field surgery on prisoners of war.

Not that a princess should have been, either.

“I’m…” she scrambled for some reason that she would have performed surgery on Captain Lovelace. “I’m the princess’s personal physician,” she managed to get out.

This got her another sharp, suspicious look from the guard. “I had not heard that the princess’s health was in such a state as to need a personal physician.”

“It’s not,” Rosemary said, trying to be reassuring. “I…” she sought for another comfortable lie. “She funds my research,” she said, lifting her chin in a challenge. “My interests lie in the study of the physical world as a whole, not just the human body. And that takes funds, which are hard to come by during a war.”

The guard’s lip curled into a sneer. “So you are a parasite.”

She took immediate offense. Perhaps he really was a dreadful man. “A parasite for the greater good,” she insisted. But wasn’t it the truth? She had struggled and fought to claim her place in the succession of Goddard’s royal family, because she had known that it was the only way she could make her life anything but the small, dull thing that it had been, ground beneath the indifference of her birth parents. “Your captain is here, alive, and all because of my work. Or were you hoping you would get her job?” she added snippily, making as if to draw her arm out of the guard’s.

His eyes softened, and he snagged her hand in his, keeping her arm tucked beneath his own. “I apologize,” he said quietly, that low voice of his sending a shiver down her spine. Well, that and the warmth of his palm against hers—she wasn’t wearing gloves. “I am very glad that Is—that Captain Lovelace was returned to us.” And then he smiled down at her, soft and melting, and Rosemary wondered if this was what people felt like when she dazzled them on purpose with her smile. She certainly found herself staring wide-eyed at that smile, unable to break away until it faded off his face.

Rosemary cleared her throat and turned her attention to the stones of the path in front of them. They had slowed almost to a stop as she had tried to calm his suspicions, and even now she did not know why she had tried to convince him that she was someone other than who she was. There was a banquet tomorrow, a formal introduction between her and the prince, and this guard would find out who she was then, if not sooner. And perhaps he would resent her for it.

And she could not afford resentment. Not in someone she might have to trust her life to.

She opened her mouth to confess the deception.

“You two done canoodling?” The voice of Captain Lovelace called from the door to Rosemary’s suite, currently somewhere behind them, and Rosemary felt a hot flush on her cheeks again. “Because we’re done here,” Captain Lovelace added, coming up behind the other guard and clapping him on the shoulder. The guard dropped Rosemary’s hand as if it were a hot coal, and she withdrew a careful step, rubbing her thumb across her palm, though she was unsure of whether she was trying to wipe away the feeling of his hand as it had been, warm against hers, or trying to preserve it.

“Thank you for the company,” she said, beaming up at him, dropping him her best curtsey. Captain Lovelace seemed amused by this—had Renée confessed who Rosemary actually was to the woman? If so, she might well be amused by a princess curtseying to a guard—but didn’t interject as the guard mumbled something that Rosemary thought was a farewell.

Rosemary watched the pair of them go, watched as they knocked on the door on the other side of the courtyard to be let out, chewing on her lower lip the whole while. Well, she had made a mess of things. Clearly she had forgotten how to be anything but what she had become, in the years since King Marcus and Queen Miranda had taken her as their heir.

But she knew what she had been, and she would never escape that.

“Rosemary,” Renée’s voice called from behind her. “Are you coming in?”

She took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Just a moment.” But in the time she had been walking with the guard, the sun had sunk low enough that the only patch of sunlight was high on the wall over her head, and the cool of the early-spring air was shivering its way through the thin shawl she had tucked into her bodice.

And it would do no good for her to linger on her mistakes. She would just have to try and fix them, when next she encountered the man.

With luck, he would not resent her lies too much.


	3. Chapter 3

Renée waited in the open door, watching as Rosemary wrapped her arms around her torso and shivered. And then Rosemary turned around, a smile pasted on her face that Renée was fairly certain was fake. “Well. Better get the rest of my things unpacked.”

“It could wait until morning. Or you could let me help.” Renée stepped out the door to make space for Rosemary to enter her rooms again and glanced up at the balconies overlooking the courtyard, meeting Jordan and Klein’s eyes in turn and getting nods of acknowledgement from them both. Nothing untoward had happened, then. Well, perhaps Captain Lovelace did know her prince well.

Rosemary scoffed and bustled past Renée into her rooms. “You wouldn’t know what to do with most of it. The dresses or the experiments.”

“I wear dresses,” Renée protested. At Rosemary’s raised eyebrow, she added “Well, all right, I’ve worn _a_ dress. They’re not exactly practical on horseback.”

“Which is where you were raised, I’m certain.” Rosemary headed through to her bedchamber and went towards the large, flat case she had laid out on a table. It held what she called her experiments, an array of vials and samples, all peculiar colors and strange smells, very few of which Renée knew the purpose of. She had told Renée when packing the thing that she had no expectation of having time to work with any of it—and she had considered much of her equipment, like her microscope, too fragile to travel—but that she felt more secure having the case’s contents with her, where she could make certain that no one was tampering with them.

Right now, she seemed to be checking everything over for breakage, though Renée was certain that Rosemary had already done so before going out on her impromptu walk. A clear sign that she was distracted.

She scooped a vial out and frowned at it. “So, did you manage it?”

“We’ve worked out security up through the wedding. We’ll need to have another meeting afterwards to discuss the best way to deal with the wedding journey.” The two would spend the next four months visiting important political players in both Hephaestus and Goddard, and Renée was already dreading it. So many things could go wrong on the road.

Rosemary returned the vial to the case with a sigh. “You know that’s not what I meant. Were you two able to find some way for me to meet Prince Alexander before tomorrow night?”

Renée stared at Rosemary confused. “Er...”

“Oh, don’t tell me you forgot.” Rosemary shot Renée a hurt look. “Is it too much to ask that my first conversation with my future husband happen somewhere other than a crowded banquet hall the night before our wedding?”

She had turned her attention back to her case of experiments, which was a good thing, because Renée was certain she had a very peculiar expression on her own face. Well, Isabel had won that bet. Not that Renée had taken it, because she had thought it ridiculous when Isabel had claimed that neither of their charges would realize who the other was.

But she had not bargained for a princess who had once been as common as the dress she was currently wearing and a prince who was clearly as reticent as rumor made him out to be.

“We’re still working out the details,” she said out loud.

“Which means it isn’t going to happen.” Rosemary sighed again, pressing her hands into the tabletop. “Damn.”

“You don’t have to go through with it.” Renée took a step closer, into what she hoped was Rosemary’s peripheral vision. “Just say the word and I’ll pack you back in that carriage and take you home. No questions asked.”

Rosemary let out a snort of laughter. “And after I spent all the political capital I’ve gained over the past decade on convincing everyone that ceasefire and an alliance was the way forward? They’d run me out of the country.” She chewed on her lower lip, contemplative. “No, I’m certain I want to do this. And if what Lieutenant Lovelace and that guard have said about the man is true, I imagine we’ll rub along well enough. I just wish I knew.”

Rosemary probably already did know whether she liked Prince Alexander or not, even if she didn’t realize it. Renée considered for a moment whether or not to reveal the guard’s true identity... but if he had not revealed it himself, what did that mean? Did he often go around in a guard uniform? Would revealing his identity when he hadn’t done so himself put him at risk?

Renée cleared her throat. “I’ll go talk to Captain Lovelace again once you’re settled for the night. Maybe we can work something out.”

Rosemary turned and leaned against the table, smoothing her hands down the front of her skirt as she gave Renée a grateful look. “Thank you. I got a little bit out of that guard, but not as much as I wanted to. He was surprisingly...” And then, to Renée’s amusement, Rosemary bit her lower lip and flushed.

“Surprisingly?” Renée prompted.

“Loyal,” Rosemary mumbled, the word coming out as if she had been thinking some other word in its place. She looked ashamed of herself, and Renée thought she knew why.

“Were you flirting with him?”

Rosemary cast her gaze towards the floor and grimaced. “In all fairness, he started it.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” And Renée was struggling to hide her laughter, as she had when Isabel had told her that it was the prince out there, walking around the courtyard with his future wife.

Fortunately, Rosemary seemed to think Renée was hiding her laughter for other reasons. “Oh, honestly! Is it my fault if people take it as flirting when I smile up at them and ask friendly questions?”

Renée hid a laugh in a cough. “No, Your Highness.”

Rosemary glared at her. “And don’t ‘Your Highness’ me, I’ve told you I hate that when it’s just the two of us.”

“Rosemary.”

“That’s better.” Rosemary shut her eyes and slumped a bit. “If I get ready for bed now, you’ll have more time to work things out with Captain Lovelace, so I think I’m going to summon my maid and let you get on with your evening.” Her eyes snapped open again. “Unless there’s something that needs my attention?”

Renée shook her head. “Not that I can think of.”

“Then how about I promise not to leave this room until tomorrow morning and you go do some flirting of your own.” Rosemary smirked as Renée let out a small noise of protest. “Go. How many guards have you got on me?”

“Six.”

“More than enough to keep an eye on me. Get out of here.” Rosemary winked. “One of us should get the chance to do some courting, even if you two can’t work anything out for me and the prince.”

Renée rolled her eyes. Not that Rosemary would—or should—believe her if she protested that nothing was going on between her and Captain Lovelace, because the truth was Renée was fairly certain that even if there wasn’t anything right now, both she and Isabel would like to change that. But Renée was relying on the tenuous relationship built up between them during the months when Isabel had been a prisoner, recovering from her wounds. It was an entirely different and admittedly distracting thing to meet her as an equal.

And right now Renée could not afford distractions. She didn’t know the true state of things in Hephaestus, but in Goddard, more than a few nobles and even more of the citizens regarded King Marcus and Queen Miranda as upstarts, who had reached beyond the class they had been born to and who were bound to lead the country into ruin. And such people resented Princess Rosemary even more, both for being the second generation of such a debauched system as their leaders choosing their own inheritors and for bringing an end to the machinery of war, which had spelt profit for so many even as it meant death for so many others over the decades since the conflict had begun.

So no, she could not afford distractions. Not when her distraction could mean the death of the princess or the prince, and an end to the tenuous alliance they were trying so hard to build.

But for now, she simply tossed Rosemary a sarcastic “Yes, your Highness,” and left the room to do her rounds, sending in the princess’s maid as she went. A final check after she had swept the surrounding hallways confirmed that Rosemary must have fallen asleep the moment her head hit the pillow. By now she was snoring softly.

A relief. The princess never travelled well, and had found the extra security heaped upon her for this journey burdensome. And while Rosemary was not usually given to crankiness, Renée had been subjected to more than a little of it during their journey from Canaveral to this fortress.

She did a final round, this time checking in with the members of Rosemary’s personal guard where they were stationed around her room. Everyone was alert enough, except for Officer Eiffel, who was dead on his feet. As Officer Eiffel and his lute had spent half the day sitting on the front of the princess’s carriage, trying to distract her from her roadsickness with impromptu ditties, many of which had sounded highly inappropriate but which had kept the princess smiling instead of vomiting, Renée supposed he deserved to take the night off.

And finally, she could not put it off any longer.

To Renée’s surprise, when she reached the section of the fort that had been set aside for the Hephaesteans, she only had to introduce herself to a guard, who immediately said “Of course, right this way. Captain Lovelace is waiting for you.”

The guard summoned a page, who lead Renée to a small room that had once been a storage room of some sort and which now appeared to have been hastily converted into an office, with hints of bedroom thrown in as an afterthought. Isabel was sitting at the desk, in her shirtsleeves, the white linen gaping at her throat and the sleeves rolled up to reveal slender but powerful forearms, one still networked with the tracery of pale and shiny scars left over from the operation that had most likely saved her life as well as her arm.

And oh, gods be damned, Renée wanted to bury her face in that exposed expanse of neck, wanted to trace each and every scar with a soft and gentle touch, wanted... but now was not the time for wanting. Now she needed to remember why she was here.

Why was she here again?

Oh, right.

Isabel finished the sentence she had been working on and set her quill aside, putting a piece of blotting paper over whatever it was she had been working on. And then she leaned back in her chair and propped her elbows up on the arms, and blistering hells, Renée was completely distracted again, because Isabel was definitely not wearing anything under that shirt.

Isabel had been half-dead when she had been shipped back to Hephaestus. Oh, Rosemary and Renée had done what they could, but the infection that had almost taken Isabel’s arm had taken its toll in other ways. Isabel had been skin and bone when Renée had delivered her to the court of Hephaestus.

But eight months of rest—if taking on the job of Captain of the Guard for a prince could be considered rest—and regular meals had clearly lead to a full recovery, and Isabel Lovelace in good health was... well, she was a damn attractive woman.

And Renée was still staring at her.

She cleared her throat. “Right. Hi.”

Isabel looked as if she were trying not to laugh. “Hi to you, too.”

“Uh...” Renée tried again to remember why she was there. “You knew I’d be coming?”

Isabel snorted. “Yeah, about when Alexander turned to me on the walk back and asked me if I was sure that the woman he’d been talking to was the one who had operated on my arm.” She lifted said arm and stretched her fingers out, then closed them into a fist, one by one. “Yours didn’t figure it out either?”

Renée shook her head, trying to ignore the way her gaze had been drawn back to Isabel’s arms by that move.

“Do you think it’s going to be a problem?”

“I...” Renée hesitated. “Her Highness asked me to set up a meeting with Prince Alexander before the banquet, if we could manage it. I think it might be easier on both of them if we let them correct the misunderstanding privately.”

Isabel sighed. “As funny as I think it would be to watch it play out in real time at the banquet, I suppose we should take the path that doesn’t lead to an international incident. I’ll bring Alexander by tomorrow. For morning tea, if that’s a thing idle nobles do in Goddard?”

Very few nobles had been idle in recent history, but Isabel’s suggestion had its advantages. Food might make things less awkward, or at least would give everyone something to do with their hands. “I think I can arrange something.”

Isabel smiled. “Good.” And then she looked Renée up and down, her gaze suddenly heated. “Now get the hell out of here before I do something _incredibly_ stupid and invite you to stay the night.”

Renée laughed off the hot flush that must have darkened her cheeks at those words, and threw Isabel a very correct salute. “Yes, sir.”

“Ah, there we go, as good as a bucket of ice water,” Isabel said drily. “Well done.”

“See you tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”


	4. Chapter 4

It took all of Rosemary’s patience to wait until she was certain Renée was gone before sneaking out of her bedroom. The hard part was not falling asleep in truth, and Rosemary suspected that she had dozed off for a few moments while waiting. Or at least it had seemed as if she had jolted awake at the sound of Renée closing the door after checking on her.

But once Renée was gone, it became easy again. Whoever had been set to guard the servant’s entrance to her quarters had left their post for some reason, and in her plain travel gown, Rosemary was not so out of place that the soldiers or servants she encountered either recognized her or felt the need to stop her as she wended her way through the passages towards the section of the castle occupied by the Hephaesteans.

It was time for Rosemary to take matters into her own hands, and go meet the prince herself. And if she was lucky, Renée would be too busy getting lucky to realize that her charge had slipped the coop before Rosemary had a chance to slip back into it. It would be like she had never gone anywhere at all.

Rationalization, she knew. Renée had an instinct for shenanigans, and would most likely get Rosemary to confess to sneaking out, and then would berate Rosemary for putting herself in danger. But outside of her private guard, no one in this castle would be likely to know who she was, and in this dress, she was just another servant, part of the coterie who had arrived to prepare for the wedding. So it ought to be safe enough.

Of course, now that she was on her way, she was realizing that there was a big difference between memorizing the floor plan of a castle as big as Fort Hermes, and actually navigating it. Rosemary was beginning to wish that she had brought one of her other guards into this conspiracy—she knew Jordan and Klein, at least, had spent some time serving here, which was part of why they had been assigned to her guard for the wedding—but no, they would have felt compelled to wait on Renée’s approval. Better to go about this herself.

She thought she was getting closer to where she wanted to be, at least. There was a Hephaestean uniform. And there…

“Oh, hello again!” Rosemary darted across the hall to step in at the side of the guard who had come along with Captain Lovelace that afternoon. He was out of uniform now, in a doublet that was finely made but slightly shabby. But if it was a hand-me-down, it had been altered to fit him; it skimmed his torso and flared comfortably over his hips and looked… well, he looked far nicer than she should be acknowledging some man she wasn’t going to be marrying in a few days looked.

He frowned down at her as if he did not recognize her.

“From this afternoon? We went on a walk together?” She couldn’t remind him of her name, of course, because she had never told him it, but at that reminder—or possibly at the smile she was deliberately beaming up at him—a jolt of recognition traveled across his face.

“Ah, hello.” He offered her a small smile. “I was hoping to meet you again.”

“Were you?”

He nodded and herded her out of the hall, which was relatively crowded for this time of the evening—everyone no doubt busy with preparations for tomorrow’s banquet and the wedding to follow the next day—and into an alcove that opened off of it. There was just barely space in the alcove for them to stand a few feet apart and look at one another, and it was, perhaps, uncomfortably close for both of them. Or at least the guard blushed when he looked down at her, and she suspected their closeness was why.

“I wanted to apologize properly,” he said, quietly enough that he could only barely be heard over the sound of people passing by in the hall proper. “I should not have called you… well.” He blushed harder, the red spreading to his ears. “I am sorry.”

Rosemary fidgeted, rubbing a fold of her skirt between thumb and finger. “It was an accurate assessment.”

He shook his head. “No. Anyone who can do what you did for Isabel is not a parasite. It was skilled work.”

She tilted her head to one side and considered him. “You are a man of medicine yourself?”

“Ah.” He blinked owlishly down at her. “Yes, I suppose I am. Medicine and the natural sciences.”

Much how she spent her own spare time. And oh, she should not _like_ this man as much as she did. But she found herself beaming up at him in earnest now, in spite of the fact that she knew better. “We should sit down for a proper talk some time. Maybe there’s some overlap between our areas of interest. We could collaborate.” And hopefully her future husband would not resent her spending her free time with a guard.

“I would like that,” he said huskily, smiling down at her. And then he seemed to retreat into a cold distance, in the same way he had that afternoon. “Were you looking for me?”

“Ah, no!” Rosemary looked up at him, her eyes wide. “I was looking for the prince.” She cast about for a reason she would be doing so and settled on “Princess Rosemary wanted me to take him a message.”

The guard held out his hand. “I could deliver it for you.”

Rosemary looked dubiously down at that hand. Never mind the fact that she didn’t have a note to give him; if she dug in her pockets and handed over whatever scrap of paper she could find there, not only would she scotch her chances of seeing the prince for herself tonight, but he would probably think her very peculiar indeed, depending on which hastily scratched note to herself she managed to dig out.

“For his ears only,” she told the guard, lifting her chin in a challenge.

He tilted his head to one side and raised an eyebrow, an amused little smile playing at the corner of his mouth as the coldness melted away again. “And I am simply to trust that you are not an assassin?”

Rosemary gestured expressively down at her body. “Do I look like one?”

He gave her chest a lingering, heated look that made her blush. “Perhaps you use your looks to take your victims off guard in order to get close enough to stab them.”

Rosemary snorted. “If so, I would have already stabbed you.” She gave him a pleading look, and reached out to touch his upper arm gently. “I’ll happily pass the message along with you in the room, if that will make you feel better.” Though how this man would feel about her being the princess, she wasn’t quite ready to find out.

For some reason, he seemed to find this amusing; his mouth twisted as if he were biting the inside of his lips to keep from laughing, and his eyes had crinkled into little lines at the corners in a way that made him unfairly handsome. He regained control over himself with a little cough. “I… ah. I happen to have a key to the Prince’s bedchamber. I could take you along to see him.”

Did he, now. And here he’d been claiming that he didn’t know how to judge the attractiveness of the prince. Perhaps her future husband would merely be grateful that she got along well with his lover. “Thank you,” she said meltingly, beaming up at the guard. “And here you had me believing that you didn’t find the man attractive.”

The man’s eyes opened very wide. “Ah. I mean—it is not that I have a key—it is just that all of the members of his personal guard—“

Rosemary waved off his stammered excuses. “You don’t have to prevaricate. I—I mean, the princess was well aware that Prince Alexander was likely to have some pre-existing arrangement of some sort, if he was interested in that sort of thing. She’s more than happy to give him whatever freedom he wants to indulge in such things.”

Alexander stared down at the princess’s serving woman, still feeling a bit startled by her declaration. Well, he had been wondering what sort of marriage he would be entering into; while this had not come directly from Princess Rosemary’s mouth, he had gathered that this woman was close enough to the princess to speak on such things with authority.

He realized he was gaping and snapped his mouth closed. “Ah.” He cleared his throat. “Is that so.”

The woman nodded. “No judgement. Complete freedom. It’s not as if the two of them will need children. They’ll choose their heirs, same as the last two generations have.”

Alexander still thought that method of inheritance was a peculiar arrangement, and endeavored to change the subject to something he was marginally more comfortable with. “Shall we?” he asked, gesturing back towards the hall.

“Of course.” The woman slipped out into the hall ahead of him, and Alexander offered her his arm. He had been wandering the halls in search of some distraction to calm his anxiety about the next two days; he supposed that pretending to take this woman to see, well, himself, would be a sufficient distraction, though it might cause more anxiety than it relieved. He probably ought to tell her who he was, but the woman gave him no openings as he lead her deeper into the section of the fort currently occupied by his retinue.

Finally, they reached his bedroom door and Alexander paused, unsure of what to do next. Should he let her in to an empty room? Should he prevaricate?

Fortunately, the woman he was escorting took the matter out of his hands and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. There would not be. No one was in the room, and there was not even a servant’s entrance.

The woman tilted her head to one side and looked up at him, hesitant and side-long. “Would you…?”

Alexander shook his head, finally finding the words he had been looking for. “He prefers that all visitors knock and wait to be admitted, whether they have a key or not. He scolds them quite roundly if they enter without his leave.” A truth, couched in a careful distance.

She bit her lower lip, looking a bit flustered. “Do you suppose he’s asleep?”

Alexander thought about putting her out of her misery and revealing his identity, but, well, she was very cute when she was flustered, and he was allowing himself to enjoy this while he could. “Or he is busy with wedding plans.”

For some reason this seemed to fluster the woman even more. “Damn. And I can’t wait for very long.” She looked up at Alexander with a frown. “Do you know where he might be?”

Alexander was about to take pity on the poor woman when the sound of a door opening behind him distracted them both. He half-turned to see if it was Isabel coming out of her room, but the woman let out a frightened little squeak and pulled him further into the recessed doorway that lead to his room. She clung to the front of his doublet, keeping him there, and then buried her face against his chest as Lieutenant Minkowski went striding past, looking as if she had very little on her mind but the woman whose room she had just exited.

And then, halfway down the hall, she paused.

“Please use the key, I _beg_ of you, I’ll explain to the prince if he’s in there, she can’t catch me,” the woman clinging to Alexander’s chest said in a low, frantic hiss of breath.

Alexander did not understand why this woman would be so afraid of Lieutenant Minkowski when she had the ability to order the Lieutenant around, but perhaps Lieutenant Minkowski disapproved of whatever message the princess intended to send to him by way of this woman. As she spoke, he dug the key out of the pocket hidden in the full skirt of his doublet, and as Lieutenant Minkowski slowly turned, he hastily stuck the key in the lock and turned it. The woman pushed through the door, ducking out of sight behind it before Lieutenant Minkowski completed her turn.

Lieutenant Minkowski frowned at Alexander, and he frowned back.

“Yes?”

“Is that your room?”

“Yes.” He raised his eyebrows deliberately. “I am just going to bed, Lieutenant,” he said.

That frown dug itself deeper. “Alone?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

A suspicious frown remained on her face—and no wonder she was suspicious, she had to have seen at least some part of the woman who was now hiding in Alexander’s room—but she obviously decided that his business was none of hers, gave him a very correct salute and turned again, going on her way.

Alexander let out a puff of breath and followed the woman into his room, leaving the door cracked open to allow light from the hallway to filter in, intending to interrogate her about what had just happened. But the sight of her face stopped him.

“He isn’t here.” The woman looked about ready to cry. “Damn. I just wanted...”

The wording made Alexander frown. “You just wanted?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose.” She swallowed hard and slid her hand through a slit in the side of her skirt, eventually digging out a handkerchief and using it to dab hastily at her eyes.

“There is paper in the desk,” he offered quietly. “And some charcoal. You could write the message down for him.”

She peered up at him over the handkerchief. “And you promise not to peek, I suppose,” she said, her voice low and amused.

“I swear.” Alexander placed his hand over his heart. “Only the prince will read it.”

She studied him seriously in the dim light that filtered in from the hall. “All right,” she said. “Lead me to it.”

Alexander hunted down the candle he had left just inside the door and ducked out into the hall to light it from one of the covered sconces in the hall, then joined the woman in his room once more, pulling out paper and charcoal for her and then turning his back as she scribbled away hastily. It took her very little time—whatever message Princess Rosemary wanted to send him must have been a short one—and then there were the sounds of her tapping charcoal dust off the resulting message and the crinkle of her folding the page.

She joined him a moment later, tucking her arm back through his. “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” Alexander blew out the candle and set it back on the shelf next to the door as he left the room. The woman peered down the hall suspiciously before following him out, and Alexander locked the door once more with the key, retrieving it from the lock once he had. “Shall I return you to the princess’s quarters…?”

The woman gave him a grateful look. “If you know the way. I memorized the floor plan, but I was dreadfully lost when I ran into you.”

Alexander had thoroughly explored the section of the fortress occupied by his people, but he had not gone far beyond its bounds. Still, he thought he remembered the path Isabel had taken him along that afternoon. He squared his shoulders. “I can try.”

Together, they managed to make their lost and bumbling way along to the entrance to that little courtyard that lead to Princess Rosemary’s quarters, a journey that was accompanied by the woman he was escorting giving him barely a chance to respond once more as she babbled on about small, meaningless topics like the weather and the trip to the fortress and the wedding. He recognized it now as the exhaustion it was; she stumbled a few times and leaned heavily against him along the way, and her conversation meandered in a way that made him suspect that she was not entirely cognizant of the words coming out of her mouth.

They turned the last corner, and Lieutenant Minkowski was standing outside of the door that lead to that courtyard, her arms crossed and a glare on her face.

“Oh, gods, I’m in for it now,” the woman muttered. She patted Alexander on the arm with her free hand and then released him. “Thank you. For everything.”

And then she was gone, head held high, striding down the corridor towards a clearly displeased Lieutenant Minkowski.

Alexander watched her go, waiting until she was safely in the Lieutenant’s custody before turning and making his own meandering way back to his bedroom.

He lit the candle once more and went straight to his desk, picking up the folded piece of paper to read the message the woman had scrawled on it.

 _I am sorry for dragging you in to this. I hope you can forgive me for upsetting your life_ , the scrawling words read.

It was signed simply _Rosemary._

Alexander pulled out the chair that was attached to the desk and sat down hard.

Had that been the princess?


	5. Chapter 5

Renée took one look at Rosemary’s tired face and sighed. While she _could_ scold the princess for sneaking out of her rooms that evening, she highly doubted that Rosemary would awake enough to register one word of it. So instead, she shooed Rosemary across the little courtyard and back into her rooms.

“I can tell you’re absolutely furious with me,” Rosemary said, drawing to a halt just inside the door. “In my defense—“

“Bed.”

“I just wanted to meet him,” Rosemary said softly, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. “Just once. As people, before we have to stop being people and become royalty instead.”

And suddenly, Renée couldn’t bring herself to keep quiet. Not in the face of those unconscious tears, not when Rosemary was a woman who never cried, when she could help it. “And you have. Twice.”

“What?” Rosemary had been looking down at her skirt as she fumbled in her pocket, presumably looking for a handkerchief, but at Renée’s words her head snapped up, and she stared at Renée with wide, startled eyes.

“And he’s coming by again tomorrow morning.”

“Like hell he is.” She blinked several times and shook her head to dislodge tears. She finally unearthed her handkerchief, using it to wipe the rest of the tears away as she continued in a dry voice. “Funny joke, Renée, and I’ll thank you for shaking me out of that little mood I was in, but that can’t have been Prince Alexander.”

Renée sighed. “It wasn’t a joke.”

Rosemary lowered the handkerchief, clutching it in one hand as she studied Renée’s face. “Well, that certainly explains why he had a key to the Prince’s bedchamber,” she rasped.

Renée shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. So she had seen what she had thought. She just hadn’t expected it was her gods-be-damned princess going in to the room with him. “Rosemary, are you telling me that not only were you sneaking around the castle unguarded, you went into a room alone with a man you thought was a soldier?” She opened her eyes to glare down at Rosemary and found the other woman chewing her lower lip contemplatively.

“Not exactly,” Rosemary said. “I thought I was going into a room alone with my future husband’s lover.”

Renée tried to think of some way to respond to that and couldn’t. “You’re not paying me enough to deal with this,” she said instead of something more sensible.

“I’ll make sure you and the rest of my guard get a raise,” Rosemary promised.

Renée snorted. “What did the rest of those layabouts do to earn a raise? They couldn’t keep one princess from sneaking out!”

“To be fair, I _did_ use the servant’s entrance.”

“Which... oh, gods-be-damned, that was where Eiffel was stationed.” Renée sighed. “And here I was, so hasty to go do your bidding that I forgot to assign someone new when I told him to go to bed.”

“Hasty to go do my bidding, or hasty to go make eyes at your lady-love?” Rosemary teased.

Renée felt her face flush. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said stiffly. “And that’s the kind of mistake that I can’t afford to make. That _neither_ of us can afford to make.”

Rosemary wilted a little. “I promise, I’ll stay confined to quarters unless I have an escort from now on. And now I’m going to do what I said I’d do an hour ago and _actually_ go to bed, I promise.”

“Want me to ring for your maid?”

Rosemary waved Renée off. “You know I like to be able to get out of my traveling gowns on my own. And she’s probably sleeping off a day of dealing with me at my worst. Best not to disturb her.”

Renée still hovered over the princess until she was in her nightgown and actually in bed, and then went to take up station outside the servant’s entrance. A glance into the nook that was set up for Hera, Rosemary’s head maidservant, revealed the young woman was asleep and clearly too exhausted to notice anything. No doubt why she had not noticed Rosemary sneaking out.

Renée wished she could sleep herself, but it was another two hours until shift change. And anyway, she was probably still too keyed up from briefly losing track of the princess to sleep.

Damned royals. If they weren’t careful, they’d get themselves killed.

And then where would Renée be?

“Hey. Wake up.”

Alexander let out a grunt and rolled over, pulling the coverlet of his bed further up around his head.

Isabel sighed and prodded him in the shoulder. “Prince Alexander, get your damned self _out_ of _bed_. You’ve got a meeting with the princess to go to.”

“Don’t want to,” he muttered, still obviously half-asleep.

“Don’t you want to meet your future wife?”

“Already have,” he grunted. “Awful woman. Flirt.”

Isabel laughed. “So, figured that one out, did you? What tipped you off?”

Alexander shoved the coverlet aside and sat up, looking more than usually disheveled. “She came looking for me last night,” he said, sounding miserable. “Wanted to give me a message.”

Isabel raised her eyebrows. “And she knew who you were?”

He shook his head. “I would not have guessed, except…” he gestured at his desk.

Isabel crossed to it and picked up the crumpled piece of paper that sat on top of it. “Huh. Well…”

“She does not intend to make a real marriage of it. Our… our partnership will be all show.” And Alexander still sounded miserable.

“Yeah, that was kind of the plan, wasn’t it?” Isabel turned back towards Alexander and raised an eyebrow. “Or has she said something that makes you think you won’t be able to get along with her even well enough to put on a show?”

Alexander turned bright red. “It is not that. I just…”

Isabel laughed. “You _like_ her.”

“I do not!” he protested, a bit squeakily. He cleared his throat. “I… I simply think that I _might_ like her. Given time. But she… she was talking about things like complete freedom to make my own arrangements, and that we would not need to have children of our own, and…”

“And you’re worried that she’s not even going to give you a chance to make a real marriage of it.”

“Worried that she already has arrangements of her own. Worried…” he sighed. “I thought I was reconciled to this. But now…”

“Now you need to get the hell out of bed and get dressed and just go talk to the damn woman. This might be the last chance you two get for a private meeting before you’re married to her. Take it.”

“Too embarrassed,” Alexander said, retreating back beneath his blankets.

“Imagine how much worse it’ll be if the next time you see her is at the banquet tonight.”

He emerged from his bedding again to glare at her.

“The two of you sitting there… sharing a trencher… completely incapable of having a conversation of any substance because every eye in the room is on you…”

“I’m getting up, I’m getting up,” he grumbled, following the words with action.

“I’ll leave you to that, then.”

Alexander rolled his eyes. “What, don’t want to stay and make fun of my taste in clothing?”

“Oh, I can do that just fine once you’re dressed.” Isabel turned to leave.

“Wait.”

She turned back to find Alexander looking at her anxiously. “What?”

“Could you help me choose? I… I want to make a better impression this time, and… well. Sometimes I question Lambert’s taste.”

“You’re almost cute when you’re nervous.” Isabel chuckled. “All right. Where’s that one blue doublet?”

Sam Lambert appeared and took over in a huff when Alexander was half-finished dressing. Alexander’s head retainer and his captain of the guard had been fighting an ongoing war about which aspects of Alexander’s personal life and schedule fell under whose purview for as long as he could remember, and while many attempts had been made to mediate between the pair of them, they were as entrenched in their conflict as the kingdoms of Hephaestus and Goddard had been in their war.

“I’m just saying, it’s _my_ job to make sure he’s properly dressed!” Sam protested, fussing with the way Alexander’s doublet was laying. “This doesn’t even _remotely_ fall under your purview!”

“I was checking his seams for poison,” Isabel said, straight-faced.

“You were interfering in my job!”

“He asked me to!” She looked to Alexander for back-up.

“Er, yes, I did ask her to help me pick out my clothing,” Alexander said, injecting himself awkwardly into their argument.

“You could have rung for me,” Sam grumbled.

“He said he didn’t trust your taste,” Isabel said.

“What?” Sam straightened up to his full, gangly height of six feet and two inches and glared indignantly down at Alexander from on high. “My taste is impeccable!”

“Er. Well. I did not say that I did not trust your taste, exactly…”

“Sorry. He said that he _questioned_ your taste,” Isabel interjected.

“Isabel!” Alexander hissed, turning his head to glare at her. “It is not so much questioning, as it is… ah… I do not think I am the sort of person who is _meant_ to be fashionable, you see.”

This got him another indignant look from Sam. “ _Anyone_ can be fashionable if they have the right clothing,” he declared.

“Yes, of course,” Alexander said meekly. “But perhaps… less lace? Only—“ he rushed to say as Sam opened his mouth to scold him “—I always end up trailing it through whatever I am working on—by accident, I swear!—and, well… you get so upset when I ruin another new outfit.”

“You could,” Sam said huffily, starting in on Alexander’s hair with a comb, working a little less gently than he could be as he unpicked a knot in its length, “pay more attention to what you’re doing.”

“I do try,” Alexander said, attempting to reassure Sam despite knowing that he did not, in fact, ever try to remember to keep the fancy lace cuffs Sam stuck on Alexander when he could get away with it out of whatever he was working on at the moment.

Isabel rolled her eyes. “Right, if all you’re going to do is suck up to Mr. Fancy Pants Lambert here, I’m going to go make myself busy elsewhere. Come get me when you’re ready to go.”

Alexander sighed and remanded himself—and the remainder of his toilette—to Sam's tender mercies.

“That was disgusting,” Isabel said when Alexander knocked on the door of her room a good thirty minutes later, most of which had been spent arguing Sam out of a pair of exceptionally gorgeous lace cuffs that Alexander suspected would only be fit to be used as rags by the time he was done with them. It had taken a promise to wear them to the banquet tonight to get the man off his back. “You know you don’t have to cater to that man’s whims, right? You _do_ outrank him.”

“He cuts my hair, Isabel.” Alexander sighed. “And… he does manage to keep me from looking like a fool in public. Most of the time, at least. It is not his fault I am constitutionally unsuited to wear the clothing he provides for me.”

“So get him to provide you with clothing you _are_ constitutionally suited to wear!”

“Apparently going around in five year old doublets is not behavior befitting of a prince, even a very minor one,” Alexander said drily. “Shall we?”

“Your lover awaits,” Isabel said, smirking.

Alexander made a face. “Oh, do _not_ call her that. She is a princess. You should afford her more dignity.”

“Somehow, I think I’ll be able to get away with affording her just as much dignity as I ascribe to you,” Isabel said contemplatively as they set off for Princess Rosemary’s quarters.

Alexander scoffed, but those words clung to the worries he still carried with him from the night before.

What sort of woman _was_ his future wife, anyway?


	6. Chapter 6

Rosemary’s future husband arrived for midmorning tea with an honor guard in tow. And this time, there was no mistaking him for one of his soldiers, or even for a shabby clerk with high connections, the way she had the night before. He was dressed in a deep blue doublet that glistened with embroidery, and dainty little shoes with heels high enough to put a nice turn to his hose-clad calves. To cap off this ensemble, a thin circlet of gold rested on his brow, marking him unmistakably as a prince.

Of course, there was no mistaking her for a member of her staff today either, though she suspected if they compared the amount of embroidery on their outfits, she would only come out ahead because she was so much larger around than he was.

He looked stiff. Uncomfortable. Well, so was she. It was one thing to have a casual conversation with the man when neither of them knew who the other was; now, however, every action felt like it was underpinned with political significance.

Probably because it was.

Too gods-be-damned much pressure. It sent a shiver down her spine just thinking about it. But they’d have to make it work, one way or another. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about. The alternative was returning to war, to loss, to death. The alternative would probably destroy both of their countries, in the end.

She came forward to greet him, flanked on one side by Renée, coming to a halt in the middle of the courtyard where a little table had been set up beneath a spindly tree. Prince Alexander came to a halt there as well, and gave her a very stiff, formal sort of bow.

There was nothing for it, then. She had to curtsey, that prim and proper curtsey meant to greet someone of equal rank.

“Prince Alexander.”

“Princess Rosemary.” His voice was hoarse, and he seemed unable to meet her eye. He turned to look at the table. “We are having tea here?”

He sounded dubious about the prospect, and he might as well. It was an awful place to try and have a private conversation. Rosemary knew by now that sound carried in strange ways out of this courtyard—she’d been able to hear Officer Eiffel flirting awkwardly with Hera out here this morning from her _bedroom_ , which had a whole sitting room between it and this open space—but Renée had insisted, and had declared that Captain Lovelace agreed with her, and Rosemary had learned some years ago to _never_ argue with Renée about this sort of thing. She never won, and they both ended up tired and frustrated in the end.

“Apparently it’s for, ah, security purposes,” Rosemary said, letting her annoyance at this arrangement be known in her tone of voice. “Hard to separate you from your guard and assassinate you when everyone’s watching everyone else.” A pair of Hephaestan guards had joined her own up in the balconies that oversaw the courtyard, and the honor guard that Prince Alexander had arrived with had spread out now. Except for Captain Lovelace, who was standing at his shoulder much the way Renée was standing at hers. “Not that that would stop me if I were a truly _determined_ assassin, of course.”

“I cannot imagine why you would bother assassinating me out in the open like this when you need only wait another day to have the opportunity to assassinate me in our marriage bed,” Prince Alexander said drily, glancing back in her direction.

Their eyes met, the pair of them sharing that moment of grim humor, an echo of his joking accusation from the night before. And then his cheeks flushed red, and he jerked his head back around to look at the table.

_Interesting._

Was he thinking about what might happen in their marriage bed? Not that she was planning to do anything but sleep there herself, at least not for a good long while. The Kingdom of Goddard’s current method of royal inheritance had rid them of the custom of making certain a new bride was virginal, bedded and on her way to being bred on her wedding night, thank goodness. Especially as she couldn’t provide the requisite proof of virginity any more, not that there had been any such proof when she’d actually lost it. And after the way that incident had ended, she wasn’t exactly eager to jump into bed with _anyone_ , even if he was about to be her husband.

But if he was thinking about it…

Rosemary felt her own cheeks heat. Well, all right. Maybe she was thinking about it a bit herself. He was still virtually a stranger, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t find him attractive, even if his features were more severe than handsome. “So,” she heard herself say breathlessly. “Tea.”

“Yes. Tea.”

He sounded just as flustered as she was, which helped. It was good to know that she wasn’t the only one with nerves in this situation. But instead of sitting down, they both just stood there stupidly, carefully avoiding one another’s gaze.

“I’d rather there not be any assassination attempts in your bedroom, thank you _very_ much,” Renée said dryly.

“Especially not in the bed,” Captain Lovelace added, making a face. “Mattresses are _so_ annoying to get clean again once they’re blood-soaked.”

“Have a lot of experience with that, do you?” Renée gave Captain Lovelace a sympathetic look.

“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Captain Lovelace’s unspoken “what I do in my bed” was almost loud enough to be heard in the extremely suggestive smirk on her face.

“All right, that’s enough,” Rosemary interjected. “How about the two of you take your extremely weird flirting over there”—she pointed towards the door that lead to her suite of rooms—“and Prince Alexander and I _promise_ not to assassinate one another over our tea. Sound good?”

As the two women wandered off, grumbling affably at one another, Rosemary glanced at Prince Alexander, trying to gauge his reaction to these shenanigans. He appeared struggling not to laugh. Rosemary was sorely tempted to stick her tongue out at him to see if that would send him over the edge. She didn’t, because she was a princess and theoretically too dignified to engage in such shenanigans, but the temptation was still there.

Prince Alexander made an abortive move towards the side of the table closest to Rosemary, as if planning to pull out the chair for her and thinking better of it immediately. Instead he sat in the other chair and looked over the spread in front of them. As they sat, a servant—someone from the kitchens, Rosemary suspected—came running up and filled the teapot from an ewer that was steaming faintly. She wondered how they’d been keeping it warm—anything without a heat source attached to it went cold in the time it took to get from Fort Hermes’ kitchen to her rooms.

In addition to the teapot and requisite cups, there were a ridiculous number of fussy little sandwiches and assorted sweets. Rosemary hoped that Prince Alexander’s honor guard would get a chance to take a crack at the leftovers after they were done; she knew her own guard would be descending on the table like a pack of ravenous wolves the moment they got a chance. For herself, she took two of the fussy little sandwiches and a few shortbread cookies, which was more than sufficient to fill the small plate in front of her.

She watched in amusement as Prince Alexander took his time making selections for his plate, picking among the sweets with a clearly discerning eye, though what he was discerning she had no idea. While she waited, she poured the tea for them both, taking a chance and adding a generous spoonful of honey to his.

His eyes flicked up to meet hers as she did, a shy little smile quirking the corners of his mouth up. “Thank you. I have a bit of, ah, a sweet tooth.”

“I gathered.” Rosemary tried not to smirk. “Milk as well?”

“Please.”

She added a dollop of milk and set the cup next to his now-loaded plate. “No poison, I swear.”

That made him laugh, a weak little laugh but enough to make the stiff set of his shoulders relax a little. Rosemary felt the tension in her own shoulders release a little too.

“You know,” she said, smiling sideways at him, “I kept thinking that I had all these questions I wanted to ask you, but I find that now I have the opportunity, they’ve all gone completely out of my head.”

That shy smile turned rueful. “I know the feeling,” he said, shaking his head. “I… well, I know nothing about you.” He paused and stared down at his plate, breaking one of the biscuits into small pieces. “More now, I suppose.”

“I guess we have time. The rest of our lives.”

“Mm.”

They lapsed into silence again. Rosemary took a sip of her tea, barely tasting the mint of it, and then ate one of the fussy little sandwiches. Egg and something green she couldn’t identify. Probably not watercress, not up here, not at this time of the year. But there were other early garden greens, and she supposed a truly determined gardener could get them to grow even at this elevation and at this time of the year.

“May I ask you something, ah…” Prince Alexander’s voice broke the silence, hesitant and wavering.

“Awkward?” she finished for him.

“Personal.”

“Isn’t that what we’re here to do? Ask one another _personal_ questions?”

Prince Alexander’s cheeks flushed dark. “Yes, but, ah, there is personal and then there is _personal_ , you understand?”

“You mean like the difference between asking what your favorite meal is and asking if you actually do have the male lover I assumed you had secreted away somewhere, I suppose?”

His blush spread to his ears. “Ah.”

Rosemary pushed her luck. “Well, _do_ you actually have a lover, then?”

“Not… not for several years,” he stammered, completely unable to meet her eye. “And I, ah… I do not intend to keep one.”

“I can’t imagine you’ll have time for it for the next five months or so, at least. But if you change your mind, do feel free. I shan’t hold it against you.” Rosemary’s own cheeks were burning by now, and she dropped her gaze to the table.

“Do you?” he asked, his voice squeaking out.

“Do I what?”

“Have… have a lover.”

“Ah.” Rosemary chewed her lower lip, trying to decide how much it was safe to tell him. The truth, certainly, but how much of it? “No. I don’t.”

She glanced carefully up at Prince Alexander and found him studying her with a frown on his face. She had delayed too long, she supposed. Long enough to make him suspect something, though she doubted his suspicions were landing anywhere near the truth.

He opened his mouth as if to say something and then closed it again, and then picked up one of the pastries from his plate and took a bite, as if that had been what he intended to do the entire time. Rosemary fought against the urge to blurt out all of her past at once, to offer him a truth she did not know him well enough to trust him with yet.

Just a little longer. Let them get through this wedding, let them finish the wedding tour that followed it. Let her have enough time to know whether she could trust him with her past, or whether revealing it would give him a disgust of her. Let them have enough time to figure out whether this spark of attraction could grow into a true partnership, or whether it was just momentary lust.

And until then, do her best to charm him, because by the end of the day they would be husband and wife, with the entire future of their respective kingdoms hanging on her ability to make a peaceable union with this man.


End file.
